A Comic Take on Wall Street by an Ex-Bear Stearns Executive

A strong, intelligent woman struggles to break through the double-pane glass ceiling of a top investment firm on Wall Street.

A rich, good-looking investment banker makes a killing on mortgage-backed securities, the toxic bundles of debt that in 2008 put the economy on the edge of collapse.

Actually, the two people are one and the same: Isabelle, the heroine of “Opening Belle,” a comic, semiautobiographical first-person novel by Maureen Sherry, a former managing director at Bear Stearns, which collapsed in 2008.

“I don’t feel like I made light of anyone’s pain,” Ms. Sherry said, sitting at the dining room table of her Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Central Park reservoir. Ms. Sherry said she wanted to write about the mortgage crisis in an engaging way that ordinary readers could understand and also show them that many bankers were as hoodwinked as the rest of the public.

“It’s easy to bash Wall Street, and we hear a lot of it,” she said. “I also wanted to make clear to the reader the good that banks do as well as the bad.”

“Opening Belle,” which will be in bookstores on Tuesday, is a twist on a subgenre of contemporary women’s fiction known as “chick lit.” Warner Brothers is developing a movie version starring Reese Witherspoon.

It is also the latest in a growing number of books, plays, television shows and movies addressing Wall Street during and after the 2008 crisis. There are two television series about Bernard L. Madoff, who was arrested in 2008 for what turned out to be one of history’s largest frauds. Sony Pictures Classics bought the rights to “Equity,” a thriller about an investment banker who is undercut by rival female executives. “The Big Short” was nominated for a best picture Oscar. “Billions,” on Showtime, is a present-day Wall Street drama that is colored by the financial meltdown. (Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times is a co-creator of the show.)

Ms. Sherry’s novel is a breezy comedy in the style of “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

Like her heroine, Ms. Sherry worked on the Bear Stearns trading floor, then a notoriously rowdy place. She said she took the frat-boy antics in stride. “I felt embarrassed sometimes, but not unsafe,” she said.

She left in 2000 to take care of her growing family, not to flee a hostile workplace, but she said she did feel frustrated by the barriers to advancement. She began thinking about what she wanted to write about women on Wall Street, got an M.F.A. from Columbia and wrote a children’s book. She also recently wrote a New York Times opinion piece on pay inequity and sexism.

In her novel, she presents those experiences as farce. A comic tone, she said, would make the subject more accessible and “widen the conversation.”

Isabelle endures the lewd jokes and groping of male colleagues and bosses to sell, among other things, collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.s. By 2007, Isabelle is on a bond-trading roll — until the market collapses, wiping out her gains and throwing more than one million people out of their homes.

After the market begins to fall, Isabelle and a client take a closer look at the underlying bank records, zeroing in on a family in Nebraska facing foreclosure. “My eyes well up and we sit there for a moment with something bordering wonder,” Isabelle writes in what is presented as her memoir. “I never saw things going this way.”

The novel’s dueling themes divide the mass-market publishing world. Some observers say readers might embrace it as a lighthearted but inspiring empowerment parable. “I think it can work,” said Louisa Ermelino, the reviews director at Publishers Weekly, who has not read the work but knows its gist. “Even though she is rich and powerful, she’s still a woman up against men in suits on Wall Street.”

For other students of the genre, though, it’s a step too far in favor of the 1 percent. “I would expect a novel set in the mortgage crisis to look at the precarious situations of more ordinary working women,” said Suzanne Ferriss, an English professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and a co-editor of “Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction.”

“There was a backlash against ‘Primates of Park Avenue,’ ” Ms. Ferriss noted, referring to a tongue-in-cheek memoir by Wednesday Martin about trying to fit in on the Upper East Side. “That suggests to me that in the current climate, this might not have many followers.”

This question of whether feminism outweighs populism echoes the countervailing currents in the presidential race. Voters in the Democratic primary are watching an accomplished, experienced member of the establishment, Hillary Clinton, argue that the top echelons of power are rigged against women, while her main rival, Bernie Sanders, has soared in the polls by saying that the system is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful. Republicans are watching a billionaire populist, Donald Trump, clash with Megyn Kelly, a star anchor at Fox News who questioned his respect for women in a debate.

When asked whom she supported, Ms. Sherry smiled and said, “I’m waiting for Michael Bloomberg to get in the race.”

The heroine of “Opening Belle” resembles Ms. Sherry, but with a little less gilt and gloss. “I wanted her to be relatable,” Ms. Sherry said.

Both went to Cornell. Isabelle is first-generation American. Ms. Sherry’s father was an Irish immigrant. In his younger days, her father worked as a porter in the same Fifth Avenue building where her eventual boss, Alan C. Greenberg, the legendary chairman of Bear Stearns, who died in 2014, had an apartment.

Isabelle, blond and 5-foot-11, has three children and a handsome husband who doesn’t work (but still doesn’t do his share of housework). They live on Central Park West.

Ms. Sherry, blond and 5-foot-11, has four children and is married to a private-equity investor, Steven B. Klinsky. They have a house in Southampton, and their 4,200-square-foot wood-paneled apartment was once part of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post.

In a good year, Isabelle earns $3 million. Ms. Sherry said she considered how that would play to readers, but she wanted to be realistic. “I hate the term ‘Manhattan poor,’ ” she said, but added that after taxes, as a couple with one income and three private-school tuitions, “They weren’t living large.”

“Isabelle thinks it’s O.K. to want to make money,” Ms. Sherry said, “and ambition is not a bad thing.”

Ms. Sherry interviewed former colleagues and a new generation of bankers. She said she found that while the most overt harassment has generally stopped, hurdles remain, particularly for working mothers. “They feel they never performed better, yet they feel written off,” she said.

At Bear Stearns, Ms. Sherry said she and her female peers jokingly referred to themselves as “The Glass Ceiling Club.” In the novel, Isabelle joins a secret society of the same name. Her female colleagues share their grievances about men and the young female assistants on the trading floor who flirt with their bosses and let them think all women welcome their advances. One dresses so provocatively she is nicknamed “Naked Girl.”

Ms. Sherry said her editors took out one scene she wrote where a woman goes to lunch with her boss to discuss her accounts and he instead invites her to spend the afternoon in bed. Ms. Sherry noted that she knows women who had the same experience in real life.

One is Sandra Ripert, a real estate agent today who was a Bear Stearns assistant 25 years ago and an aspiring trader who felt she wasn’t taken seriously because she lacked the right degrees or connections. “As a woman and as a Latina — I was very sultry-looking — it was hard to get ahead,” Ms. Ripert said.

In the early 1990s, Ms. Ripert said, when she was earning $24,000 a year, a boss invited her to lunch and she thought it meant she was in line for promotion. Instead, she said, her boss told her he had booked a room for them. She left the firm not long after.

Back then, Ms. Ripert said, she found Ms. Sherry “very professional and very quiet,” and also enviable. “At that time, you just wanted to be a Maureen Sherry.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: With Wall St. Center Stage, Novel About Female Trader . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe